Automated environmental mineralogy; the use of liberation analysis in humidity cell testwork

This paper explores a novel mineralogical response to the uncertainty by applying a metallurgical mineralogy technique of mineral liberation analysis on sulfide minerals from pre leach HCT material. The results show that quantitative sulfide mineral liberation analysis can be used to understand HCT leachate quality. This information could be used to increase confidence in the termination of cells which contain no significant sulfide encapsulation. Altogether, quantitative liberation analysis opens up the possibility of improving the overall efficiency and data quality of a geochemical kinetic program as opposed to the historic method of running uncertain HCT samples indefinitely to observe the long term behaviour.